Insurance for your business
- Auto repair shops
- Bars
- Carpenters
- Electricians
- Fast food
- Home-health agencies
- Painters
- Physician offices
- Restaurants
- Roofers
- Trucking companies
Learn
Compare two coverages
Business insurance for restaurants in California
Published 2026-06-05 · Updated 2026-06-11 · by Brokly
Covers full-service (table-service) restaurants — fast food and bars have their own pages here, rated separately.
What insurance do California full-service restaurants need?
Each requirement and definition below cites its statute, regulator, or public reference — full sources at the end of this section.
You're required to have
Covers medical care and part of lost wages when kitchen and dining-room staff get hurt on the job.
Required from the first employee — every California employer with one or more employees must carry workers' compensation coverage.
Pays for medical care to treat employees injured or made ill by their jobs and replaces part of their lost income — in a full-service restaurant that means burns and cuts on the cooking line, kitchen and dining-room slips, and lifting injuries. It also protects the restaurant from most lawsuits by injured employees. Hot surfaces, knives, fryers, and wet floors make staff injuries the steady, defining claim source of restaurant work.
Typically covers
- Medical bills for a work injury, at rates the state sets
- Part of the injured employee's lost wages
- The employer too: covered employees generally can't sue over the injury
Typically doesn’t
- Injuries outside work
- Independent contractors, in most states
- Lawsuits that get around the can't-sue trade-off — that's the employer's liability part of the same policy
Source: California Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Workers' Compensation — Employer FAQ (citing Cal. Labor Code § 3700)
Required in specific situations
Liability coverage for restaurant-owned delivery and catering vehicles.
California requires owners and operators of motor vehicles — including commercial and fleet vehicles such as a contractor's van or a delivery car — to carry minimum liability insurance of $30,000 for bodily injury or death of one person, $60,000 for bodily injury or death of more than one person per accident, and $15,000 for property damage (30/60/15), per Insurance Code §11580.1b as raised by SB 1107 effective January 1, 2025.
Required if the restaurant runs its own vehicles for delivery or catering — nearly every state requires liability coverage on vehicles operated on its roads, and personal auto policies may not cover business driving.
Covers liability (and optionally vehicle damage) for vehicles the restaurant owns and runs for delivery or catering. Personal auto policies may not cover driving for business, and insurers can deny claims when business use isn't disclosed — the gap a commercial policy closes. Delivery and catering put restaurant vehicles on the road, where financial-responsibility laws and personal-policy business-use exclusions bite.
Typically covers
- Liability when a business vehicle injures someone or damages property
- Accidents in vehicles titled to the business, driven by employees for work
- The liability minimums states set for business vehicles
Typically doesn’t
- Your liability when employees drive their own cars for work — that's hired and non-owned auto; the employee's own car stays on their personal policy
- The freight or goods being hauled — that's cargo or inland marine coverage
- Damage to your own vehicle, unless physical damage coverage is added
Source: California DMV — Insurance Requirements
Worth a look for this trade
Customer injuries on your premises — and harm caused by the food you serve.
Protects the restaurant against claims of bodily injury or property damage to others: a guest who slips in the dining room, or a customer injured by food the restaurant served — the CGL's premises and products sections respond to the trade's slip-and-fall and foodborne-illness exposures. A dining room full of guests plus food as your product means injury exposure every shift.
Typically covers
- Injuries to customers, visitors, and other third parties
- Damage your operations cause to someone else's property
- Legal defense for covered claims
Typically doesn’t
- Your employees' injuries — that's workers' compensation
- Mistakes in professional advice or design — that's professional liability
- Redoing your own faulty workmanship itself
Definition source: Texas Department of Insurance — Commercial general liability insurance
Fire and property damage to your space and equipment — plus the income lost while you're closed.
Pays to repair or replace the building (or your build-out) and business property — the cooking line, walk-ins, furnishings — after fire or another covered event. Insurers commonly bundle property and liability in a business owner's policy (BOP), and business-interruption coverage pays for income lost while a damaged restaurant can't operate. The commercial cooking line — open flame, hot oil, grease ducts — makes kitchen fire the defining property exposure of the trade.
Typically covers
- Your building if you own it, and improvements if you lease
- Equipment, fixtures, furniture, and inventory inside
- The common causes of loss — fire among them
Typically doesn’t
- Flood and earthquake on standard forms — separate policies
- Property in transit — that's inland marine coverage
- The income you lose while closed — that's business interruption coverage
Definition source: Texas Department of Insurance — Commercial property insurance guide
If you serve alcohol — most states' dram-shop laws let someone hurt by an over-served guest sue the restaurant.
Covers the restaurant when someone injured by an intoxicated individual sues the establishment that served the alcohol. A majority of states have dram-shop laws creating this liability (Maryland, for one, does not), and nine states require liquor licensees to show proof of coverage (or an approved equivalent) as a license condition. Serving alcohol creates dram-shop exposure: the restaurant itself can be sued for harm an over-served guest goes on to cause.
Typically covers
- Claims from injuries caused by a patron you served
- Legal defense in dram-shop suits — lawsuits over alcohol you served
- The proof of coverage many on-premises liquor licenses require
Typically doesn’t
- Ordinary slip-and-fall claims — that's general liability
- Fines or license penalties for serving violations, typically
- Businesses that don't sell alcohol — host situations usually fall under general liability
Definition source: Connecticut General Assembly, Office of Legislative Research — dram-shop report 2007-R-0730
Reservation, loyalty, and payment-card data plus the POS system every check closes through — exposure standard business policies don't cover.
Helps the restaurant respond when customer payment-card, reservation, or loyalty-program data is exposed, or when the point-of-sale system every check closes through is knocked out by an attack. Cyber policies are built for the costs standard policies aren't — most commercial property and general liability policies don't cover cyber risks — from data repair and credit monitoring for affected customers to business interruption and litigation. A full-service restaurant books its guests, runs their cards, and closes every check through the same connected systems — customer data plus that dependence give even a single dining room real cyber exposure.
Typically covers
- The fallout of a hack or data breach — notifying customers, restoring data and systems
- Claims from customers whose data was exposed
- Often the income lost while systems are down
Typically doesn’t
- Physical damage to property — that's commercial property
- Tricked-into-wiring-money losses on many forms — social-engineering coverage is its own add-on
- Breaches at your vendors, unless the policy extends to them
Definition source: FTC — Cybersecurity for Small Business
Exact terms live in the policy — these are the typical boundaries.
What does it all cost?
A typical <5-employee restaurant in California runs modeled $1.9k–$7.6k/yr in workers’ comp. More benchmarks are on the way to this chart.
bar height = modeled annual cost · tap a bar for that size’s range
Modeled from the $3.11/$100 payroll filed rate (2024) and each band's own observed payroll (CBP 2023). Illustrative — not a quote.
| Size band | Workers’ comp, modeled $/yr |
|---|---|
| <5 employees | ≈$3.2k |
| 5–9 employees | ≈$6.1k |
| 10–19 employees | ≈$13k |
| 20–49 employees | ≈$31k |
| 50–99 employees | ≈$70k |
| 100–249 employees | ≈$160k |
How California ranks + full workers’-comp detail →
Benchmarks in progress: Commercial auto · General liability · Commercial property · Liquor liability · Cyber insurance
Sources & notes
Illustrative benchmark — not a quote or coverage recommendation. What a restaurant actually needs depends on its operations, contracts, and carrier.
- California Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Workers' Compensation — Employer FAQ (citing Cal. Labor Code § 3700) — as of DIR DWC FAQ page dated March 2023; Lab. Code § 3700 as amended by Stats. 2002, Ch. 905; contractor-licensing rules per Stats. 2024, Ch. 485 (SB 1455) and CSLB Industry Bulletin #25-04 (Dec. 29, 2025)
- Texas Department of Insurance — Workers' compensation insurance guide — as of updated 2024-11-19
- NAIC — Small Business Insurance
- California DMV — Insurance Requirements
- Texas Department of Insurance — Delivering packages? What to know about auto insurance
- NAIC — Auto Insurance topic — as of 2025-09-26
- Texas Department of Insurance — Commercial general liability insurance
- Texas Department of Insurance — Commercial property insurance guide
- Connecticut General Assembly, Office of Legislative Research — dram-shop report 2007-R-0730 — as of 2007 report
- Maryland General Assembly, Department of Legislative Services — HB 102 fiscal & policy note (2015) — as of 2015 session
- FTC — Cybersecurity for Small Business
- NAIC — Cybersecurity topic — as of page updated 2024-05-09
- Oregon DCBS workers' compensation premium rate ranking study, June 2025 (calendar-year 2024 rates) — as of calendar year 2024
- US Census County Business Patterns 2023, state file (Full-service restaurants (NAICS 722511)) — as of 2023
Sources retrieved 2026-06-04 – 2026-06-11.
Stay informed
We’ll notify you when we’re ready to benchmark every coverage on this page.
No spam — one email.